John Wyndham - The Chrysalids

For a long time I sat on a stool, pressing my back against the wall so that nothing should approach me unaware. More than once my courage all but gave out. I wanted painfully to run away. I like to think it was my promise and the thought of Sophie’s safety that kept me there; but I do remember also how black it looked outside, and how full of inexplicable sounds and movements the darkness seemed to be.

The night stretched out before me in a prospect of terrors, yet nothing actually happened. The sounds like creeping footsteps never brought anything into view, the tapping was no prelude to anything at all, nor were the occasional dragging noises; they were beyond explanation, but also, luckily, apparently beyond manifestation, too, and at length, in spite of them all I found my eyes blinking as I swayed on my stool. I summoned up courage and dared to move, very cautiously, across to the bed. I scrambled across it, and very thankfully got my back to a wall again. For a time I lay watching the candles and the uneasy shadows they cast in the corners of the room, and wondering what I should do when they were gone, when, all of a sudden, they were gone — and the sun was shining in….

I had found some bread for my breakfast in the Wenders‘ house, but I was hungry again by the time I reached home. That, however, could wait. My first intention was to get to my room unseen, with the very thin hope that my absence might not have been noticed, so that I would be able to pretend that I had merely overslept, but my luck was not running: Mary caught sight of me through the kitchen window as I was slipping across the yard. She called out:

‘You come here at once. Everybody’s been looking all over for you. Where’ve you been?’ And then, without waiting for an answer, she added: ‘Father’s on the rampage. Better go to him before he gets worse.’

My father and the inspector were in the seldom-used, rather formal room at the front. I seemed to arrive at a crucial time. The inspector looked much as usual, but my father was thunderous.

‘Come here!’ he snapped, as soon as I appeared in the doorway.

I went nearer, reluctantly.

‘Where’ve you been?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve been out all night. Where?’

I did not answer.

He fired half a dozen questions at me, looking fierier every second when I did not answer them.

‘Come on now. Sullenness isn’t going to help you. Who was this child — this Blasphemy — you were with yesterday?’ he shouted.

I still did not reply. He glared at me. I had never seen him angrier. I felt sick with fright.

The inspector intervened then. In a quiet, ordinary voice he said to me:

‘You know, David, concealment of a Blasphemy — not reporting a human deviation — is a very, very serious thing. People go to prison for it. It is everybody’s duty to report any kind of Offence to me — even if they aren’t sure — so that I can decide. It’s always important, and very important indeed if it is a Blasphemy. And in this case there doesn’t seem to be any doubt about it — unless young Ervin was mistaken. Now he says this child you were with has six toes. Is that true?’

‘No,’ I told him.

‘He’s lying,’ said my father.

‘I see,’ said the inspector calmly. ‘Well, then if it isn’t true, it can’t matter if we know who she is, can it?’ he went on in a reasonable tone.

I made no reply to that. It seemed the safest way. We looked at one another.

‘Surely, you see that’s so? If it is not true—’ he was going on persuasively, but my father cut him short.

‘I’ll deal with this. The boy’s lying.’ To me he added: ‘Go to your room.’

I hesitated. I knew well enough what that meant, but I knew, too, that with my father in his present mood it would happen whether I told or not. I set my jaw, and turned to go. My father followed, picking up a whip from the table as he came.

‘That,’ said the inspector curtly, ‘is my whip.’

My father seemed not to hear him. The inspector stood up. ‘I said that is my whip,’ he repeated, with a hard, ominous note in his voice.

My father checked his step. With an ill-tempered gesture he threw the whip back on the table. He glared at the inspector, and then turned to follow me.

I don’t know where my mother was, perhaps she was afraid of my father. It was Mary who came, and made little comforting noises as she dressed my back. She wept a little as she helped me into bed, and then fed me some broth with a spoon. I did my best to put up a brave show in front of her, but when she had gone my tears soaked into my pillow. By now it was not so much the bodily hurts that brought them: it was bitterness, self-contempt, and abasement. In wretchedness and misery I clutched the yellow ribbon and the brown curl tight in my hand.

‘I couldn’t help it, Sophie,’ I sobbed, ‘I couldn’t help it.’

In the evening, when I grew calmer, I found that Rosalind was trying to talk to me. Some of the others were anxiously asking what was the matter, too. I told them about Sophie. It wasn’t a secret any more now. I could feel that they were shocked. I tried to explain that a person with a deviation — a small deviation, at any rate — wasn’t the monstrosity we had been told. It did not really make any difference — not to Sophie, at any rate.

They received that very doubtfully indeed. The things we had all been taught were against their acceptance — though they knew well enough that what I was telling them must be true to me. You can’t lie when you talk with your thoughts. They wrestled with the novel idea that a Deviation might not be disgusting and evil — not very successfully. In the circumstances they could not give me much consolation, and I was not sorry when one by one they dropped out and I knew that they had fallen asleep.

I was tired out myself, but sleep was a long time coming. I lay there, picturing Sophie and her parents plodding their way southward towards the dubious safety of the Fringes, and hoping desperately that they would be far enough off now for my betrayal not to hurt them.

And then, when sleep did come, it was full of dreams. Faces and people moved restlessly through it, scenes, too. Once more there was the one where we all stood round in the yard while my father disposed of an Offence which was Sophie, and I woke up from that hearing my own voice shouting to him to stop. I was frightened to go to sleep again, but I did, and that time it was quite different. I dreamed again of the great city by the sea, with its houses and streets, and the things that flew in the sky. It was years since I had dreamed about that, but it still looked just the same, and in some quite obscure way it soothed me.

My mother looked in in the morning, but she was detached and disapproving. Mary was the one who took charge, and she decreed that there was to be no getting up that day. I was to lie on my front, and not wriggle about, so that my back would heal more quickly. I took the instruction meekly, for it was certainly more comfortable to do as she said. So I lay there and considered what preparations I should have to make for running away, once I was about again and the stiffness had worn off. It would, I decided, be much better to have a horse, and I spent most of the morning concocting a plan for stealing one and riding away to the Fringes.

The inspector looked in in the afternoon, bringing with him a bag of buttery sweets. For a moment I thought of trying to get something out of him — casually, of course — about the real nature of the Fringes: after all, as an expert on Deviation he might be expected to know more about them than anyone else. On second thoughts, however, I decided it might be unwise.